~ Philosophy, Critical Theory, Christianity

The Master’s Source For Pleasure

“For example, even a subject deprived of active speech and reduced to an object has to accept this reduction and behave accordingly. This is why the master’s pleasure stems from his awareness that his slave is not simply an object but a free being compelled to act as if he were a mere object, a “speaking tool” to use Aristotle’s term for slaves . Hegel was well aware of this paradox: the key result of his dialectic of Master and Slave is the insight into how , “in order to keep a speaking being silent, it is not necessary to kill it. At this moment, politics emerges … it suffices to dominate, killing is superfluous, this is the moral of [Hegel’s] fable. To keep silent and not to kill, these are the two faces of the same axiom: the initial axiom of politics.” 26”